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Meet Lucianne Walkowicz, the Kepler planet hunter

This article was taken from the January 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

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By studying stellar light, Walkowicz can gauge how far a planet is from its star and how habitable it is. In two years of operation, Kepler has found 1,235 planets, including about 50 Earth analogues. "We have to understand how life affects our planet," she says. "That's how we will infer the existence of life."

She is also involved with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), currently being built on a mountain in Chile and expected to be operational by the end of the decade. The LSST will scan the sky every night for ten years to study astral phenomena. It will send around 1,000,000 real-time warnings per night -- about everything from supernovae to stars being ripped apart by black holes -- to astronomers around the world. "The big 'wow' for the public has been the Hubble Space Telescope with its images of the cosmos," she says. "But they are static and melancholic because we are looking at something that happened millions of years ago."